In 2030 AD, a scientist named Tatsuo Ebihara discovered the cure to a global pandemic, saving countless lives and making the Ebihara family line rich enough to wallpaper multiple mansions with $50 bills. Four hundred years later, a descendant of Tatsuo, along with his aide Kage Mishima, discovered the Daikatana and, through careful study, eventually realized that it possessed the power to transport its wielder through time. Mishima promptly took the Daikatana and traveled back in time to claim the cure for the pandemic himself. In the now-changed 2455 AD, Mishima's corporation controls much of the world, using the cure as a proverbial carrot on a stick, and it is up to Hiro Miyamoto, with the aid of Mikiko Ebihara and Superfly Johnson, to follow him, take the Daikatana and Set Right What Once Went Wrong.

Artificial Brilliance: While your allies have some issues with combat AI, their pathfinding is usually fairly good about navigating around obstacles, jumping gaps, and using ladders. Main problem is they may or may not refuse to continue when the only way down is a painful drop.

Artificial Stupidity: It's a good thing you can order your allies to sit around and let you clear out the level on your own. And despite the above trope, the enemies tend to be a lot worse when faced with obstacles.

Awesome but Impractical: Most of your arsenal, though "awesome" might be stretching it a tad. Just in the first section alone, you have a basic gun that ricochets off walls, usually straight back at you, a shotgun-revolver that fires all six of its shots when you pull the trigger once, and a C-4 launcher with a blast radius only slightly less than its maximum effective range. Right there you have two weapons that you can easily kill yourself with, and one that forces you to either waste ammunition or just stand out in the open while it gradually empties itself. Who would make guns like these?

The titular sword always leaves your opponent on 1 HP. In theory, this would allow you to deliver the finishing blow; in practice, the opponent would often slice you to pieces before you could deliver a second strike. It also blocks a third of the screen, minimum; when fully leveled up, it starts sparkling, which blocks the screen more.

BFS: The titular Daikatana takes up a third of the screen when you wield it and doesn't kill what you hit; a lethal blow reduces your target to 1 hit point, so you get to finish it off with an extra blow. Its name even literally translates to "big sword", sort of.

Big "NO!": Done by Hiro when he's sent back in time with the Daikatana.

Escort Mission: The game ends if either of your Too Dumb to Live AI partners dies, and you can't finish a level if they are trapped elsewhere in it - probably because of the cutscenes they are in later. You will be shouting "Stop Helping Me!!" far more often than you'd like. Made more bearable by the AI commands, allowing you to simply order them to hang back while you clear the place out.

Everything Trying to Kill You: Your untimely death can be brought about by (among other things) cyborg frogs, crocodiles and dragonflies, Hoplites, sharks, dwarves, rats and your own weapons. Not even by accident, either; much of your arsenal seems tailored to be just as dangerous to you as it is to everything else.

Several weapons, especially the instant death ones, will target you if there are no enemies nearby.

Experience Points: Of a sort; you can't see the actual numbers (just a vague bar that fills up; another annoyance) but if you kill enough enemies you can upgrade your stats.

The Daikatana gains experience as well, growing more powerful (and brighter) as you kill enemies with it, eventually becoming the melee weapon equivalent of a discotheque. Unfortunately, when you're using it, none of that experience goes to you.

Face-Heel Turn: Mikiko tries to seize the Daikatana for herself at the end of the game.

Fake Difficulty: Three major points of contention. The game is riddled with bugs and minor errors, the AI sidekicks are a chore at best and an active hindrance most of the time, and almost every weapon has some obnoxious mechanic that's liable to waste time (the automatic shotgun with a sticky trigger) or damage you (everything else).

One particular example in the very first level: Hard difficulty adds an invincible turret at a specific junction, which is only just barely passable without taking damage by bunny-hopping at top speed - otherwise, say goodbye to half your health.note That sort of thing would lend some credence to the "expert FPS" argument, except that the game also has multiple required drops that sap a lot of your health - and only a handful of them give you a Goldensoul or other healing items to make it less painful.

The characters on the box are okay, and can be pronounced "dai" and "katana" individually, but when characters are combined together, they can have different pronunciations. In this case, the overall word would be pronounced "daitō". Besides, katana has no distinct large version; the term actually used to describe large swords in Japan is "Odachi" or "Nodachi" - as in, "great tachi", referring to the sword that was predecessor of the katana.

Game-Breaking Bug: This game has a host of these, including a glitch in the Lair of Medusa level where, when played in co-op, the player can get stuck to the floor when spawning, and get stuck in an infinite loop of respawns and telefrags by the other players. The only way to get out of it is to noclip past that spot.

The second level of the first episode has a large door that is opened by a ghost in the cutscene that starts the level. Cutscenes are removed from co-op mode, resulting in the first episode being unbeatable in co-op without cheating.

The AI allies frequently glitch up and begin running into walls and you'll be unable to snap them out of it. Considering your allies need to be by your side to finish a level (with one exception), this was game-breaking indeed. This isn't even getting into how your allies frequently kill themselves on every stage hazard they can find, resulting in an instant failed mission.

The Nintendo 64 port of the game has a bizarre glitch. If you quit a level and go back to the main menu then try to continue your game, you will spawn with no weapons except the Disruptor Glove (the absolutely useless melee weapon you're given at the start of the game). You have to select "load game" again before continuing the game to circumvent the glitch.

Your allies also occasionally disappear outright, without the game figuring it out. Cue being unable to progress without enabling the console and spawning the NPC anew.

Gameplay Ally Immortality: Oh so painfully absent. Notable because a glitched cheat allows the player to enable it. At which point the game starts being kinda fun...

Gratuitous Japanese: In addition to the game's title, just about the name of every main character who isn't Superfly Johnson. It seems that Romero simply picked whatever cliched Japanese name or word came to his mind for his characters. The main character's family name could be seen as a tribute to Shigeru Miyamoto.

The "Miyamoto" surname is a tribute to Shigeru, but Hiro actually references the main character in Snow Crash.

It could also be a tribute to Miyamoto Musashi, which is fitting for a swordmaster.

John Romero: It was not meant to be a beginner's FPS but rather an expert FPS that required more than just the player hopping around and thinking only of themselves like most other FPS's - Daikatana required you to also help your sidekicks survive the ordeal alongside you. This new play mechanic threw many people off the game because it was too difficult.

The game's official demo was even worse — not least because the installer's self-extractor was broken, requiring you to use WinRAR or a similar program to manually extract the installation files. Moreover, the first level transition quite often caused a bug that would corrupt your save file and prevent the game from starting until you deleted the file. It's not hard to imagine that this demo contributed a lot to the Hype Backlash that doomed the finished product to failure.

Poison Mushroom: An "upgrade" to the initial melee weapon increases the weapon's damage (to the point of killing robotic enemies in a single punch), by strapping some vaguely chainsaw-like device onto it. The problem is that this makes switching to and from this weapon far slower, as each time you slap the device on, pull the starter cord, then take it off when switching back. Thankfully the device runs out of fuel after about a minute of use and gets discarded.

Precision-Guided Boomerang: The Discus of Daedalus always returns to you after it's thrown; the trouble is that a glitch sometimes causes it to hurt you when it comes back.

Real is Green: Almost everything in the first quarter of the game is a nauseating shade of green.

Amazingly, this trope is averted in the Ancient Greece era. Then played painfully straight in the Dark Ages and Present.

Rocket Jump: Doable with the Shotcycler-6, the Awesome but Impractical shotgun mentioned above. Of note is that because each shot adds its impulse to the jump...somehow...if you pull it off correctly (itself a minor miracle) it allows you to get much farther than usual for a Rocket Jump.

Each era has a weapon that is designed for rocket-jumping, and it (at least in theory) propels you enough that you don't get hurt by splash damage: the Sidewinder in Kyoto, Poseidon's Trident in Greece, the Ballista in Norway, and the Kineticore in San Fransisco. As above, though, some other weapons also work for this purpose, like the aforementioned Shotcycler in Kyoto or the Slugger's secondary fire in San Francisco.

Save Game Limits/Save Token: You have to use a Save Gem in order to save, and you can only carry three at a time. In later levels, Save Gems become rarer. A post-release patch allows you to switch off this arbitrary limit and save whenever you want.

It's more interesting than that. According to this article by one of the game's original writers, the character's "name" was Superfly Williams - a tribute to the blaxploitation series and Jim Kelly's character from Enter the Dragon. Initially conceived as a French character named after the few surviving cultural documents existing in the post-apocalyptic future, the end of the game would have seen him learn his true identity. After the writer left, the laziest possible route was taken, and... well...

Standard FPS Guns: Averted, as almost every single weapon is a gimmick weapon, and almost every single time the gimmick is "it can hurt you", which often conspires with terrible collision detection to make it seem closer to "it's designed to hurt you" in practice. In fact, it's only in the last time zone that you get your very first pistol, at which point you start to truly appreciate this trope.

Tele-Frag: If one of the players spawns in an occupied space, this will happen, resulting in the inevitable for the former occupant. Since in more than one map, everyone respawns in the same exact location, this can lead to consecutive telefragging if nobody bothers to move (or can't move at all).

Temporal Paradox: Both Mishima and Mikiko warn Hiro that this will happen if his Daikatana comes in contact with Mishima's. During the final battle, Mishima will repeat this warning, stating that if he's to die he doesn't care if the entire rest of the universe has to go down with him - and then they clash swords with no ill effects (Hiro will usually be gibbed instantly if you try it, but that's more an effect of Mishima being the most powerful enemy of the game than anything else). In the Game Boy Color version, however, Hiro can't use the Daikatana during the battle. If he had it equipped during the pre-boss cutscene, the game opens the menu so he can choose something else.

Training from Hell: The Navy SEAL training facility in 2030 contains an obstacle course consisting of several sections where you have to jump across moving platforms over an insta-kill electrified floor, dodge crushers and swim through a shark tank.

Unwinnable by Mistake: A level-design bug in one of the last levels prevented a door from opening to allow your sidekicks to regroup with you... in single player mode, no less. Fixed in a patch, but a pretty bad error to leave unnoticed.

As mentioned above, it's impossible to actually progress through the second level of the game in co-op without cheating, due to cutscenes not triggering in co-op. It's also possible to desync the traps in the first part of the SEAL Training Center's obstacle course by getting crushed in it in co-op, making it impossible to progress past it without noclip.

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